John Mowitt
Biographic Data
| ID | 766612 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John Mowitt |
| GIVEN NAMES | John |
| FAMILY NAME | Mowitt |
| SIGNATURE | MOWITT J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Leeds |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4532-655X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 37 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Mourning Without End: A Start
Mourning Sickness
Mourning Sickness” is a reverie on the work of mourning in the practice of editing an academic journal. Manifesting itself initially in the experiences of “ghosting” during the COVID pandemic, mourning, through its treatment by Jonathan Lear, unfolds here to pose the problem of the status of journaling within the precarious humanities—where will the traces of readers and writers survive?—and, through Theodor Adorno’s speculations on ghosts, mourn…
The Hole is the Untrue. The Art of Spinning a Broken Record
This is a theoretically driven consideration of the relation between art and the vinyl record that foregrounds the motif of “destruction” in attempting to comprehend this relation. Christian Marclay’s well-known work, Record Without a Cover —designed to be destroyed by individual consumers—serves as the touchstone for a series of reflections on how the aesthetic medium of the cinema has staged the destruction of records (Richard Brook’s Blackboar…
You don't say
This essay sets out to read an earlier moment in the history of the encounter between Social Dynamics and apartheid in South Africa. Specifically, it attends to the publication in 1991 on the pages of this journal of J.M. Coetzee’s “The Mind of Apartheid,” a reading of the work of Gregory Cronjé that seeks to tease out distinctly psychoanalytical motifs in an account of apartheid intimately linked to desire and madness. Reading Coetzee to the let…
Concentrationary Cinema: Aesthetics as Political Resistance in Alain Resnais's Night and Fog
Since its completion in 1955, Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog ( Nuit et Brouillard ) has been considered one of the most important films to confront the catastrophe and atrocities of the Nazi era. But was it a film about the Holocaust that failed to recognize the racist genocide? Or was the film not about the Holocaust as we know it today but a political and aesthetic response to what David Rousset, the French political prisoner from Buchenwald, id…
The Impassable Dream
This essay approaches the theme of “impasse and democracy” through the motif of the American dream, a dream, as many have noted, unfulfilled both at home and abroad. This lack of fulfilment is here read as a structural impasse within democracy, as a sign that democracy dreams, or is a dream, because it cannot come into its own. Building toward a sustained reading of a typically neglected volume in the Freudian corpus, his collaborative study (wit…
Out of Her Depths: Playing With Pauline Oliveros
To, for, with Jonathan KahanaThe human musician is deterritorialized in the bird, but it is a bird that is itself deterritorialized, “transfigured,” a celestial bird that has just as much becoming
Ecological Soundings
The Color of Noise
Initially presented as a lecture in Hout Bay, South Africa, this article seeks to realize three aims. First, under the capacious heading of postcolonial sound studies, it attempts to think the articulation between racial difference and sound by probing the now common association of color and noise, for example, the “pink” noise routinely used as a sleep aid. Despite the existence of white and black noise, color is here attributed to signal charac…
Re(a)d Work
Something in all men profoundly rejoices at seeing a car burn.1Jean BaudrillardIsh.In 1975 Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt released a black box of 113 cards designed, at least initially, to help artist
Red Assembly: East London Calling
Paolo Veronese’s Wedding at Cana and Simon Gush’s Red. Two artworks, one from the North (Venice), one from the South (East London).Figure 1. Simon Gush, Red, 2014. Installation view, Ann Bryant Gal
Restating Things, Again
Radio Silence; or, On the Fritz
This paper is a series of comparative observations—at once philological, technological, and psychoanalytical—on the phenomenon of what is referred to as radio silence. Using both terms to pressure each other, these observations feedback and build to a consideration of the relation between silence and death in which death refers less to a bio-physiological state than to a condition of unknowing or unthinking. Radio thus emerges as a high-pitched d…
Sounds: The Ambient Humanities
This book is a study of sounds that aims to write the resonance and response they call for. It seeks to critique existing models in the expanding field of sound studies and draw attention to sound as an object of study that solicits a humanistic approach encompassing many types of sounds, not just readily classified examples such as speech, music, industrial sounds, or codified signals. The text looks into the fact that beyond hearing and listeni…
Like a Whisper
This essay proposes that we grasp whispering as a problem, a sound source haunted by the violent exclusion of the animal from the medium of communication. Justification for this proposition is provided by examining the intertwining of whispering, allegory, and trauma, especially as these motifs have come to be agitated in various discourses of popular culture. Specifically, the author traces the manifestation of the figure of the Whisperer as it …
Saying Yes, to No
Spins
This essay explores some of the points of contact between philosophical reflection and dance. Paying close attention to way the figure of dance is put to work in texts by Norbert Elias, Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul de Man, Plato, and Jacques Derrida, the essay teases out a connection between the philosophical gesture of exemplification, the non sequitur whereby the abstract is propped up by or otherwise made to lean upo…
Tune Stuck in the Head
Miniature: Making Short Work
Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking
Percussion is an attempt-in the author's words-to make sense of "senseless beating," to grasp how rhythm makes sense in music and society. Both a scholar and a former professional drummer, John Mowitt forges a striking encounter between cultural studies and new musicology that seeks to lay out the "percussive field" through which beating-specifically the backbeat that defines early rock-and-roll-comes to matter for raced, urban subjects.For Mowit…
Perhaps Even Violently, via the Jolts of Fashion: An Interview by Paul Bowman
What follows is an interview with Professor John Mowitt of the University of Minnesota, which was conducted by e-mail throughout the Summer of 1999. Existing readers of parallax will be familiar with his name. Perhaps, also, you have read his book, Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object.1 If so, you might already 'know' why he would/should be asked for his thoughts on the theme of this issue. But perhaps you have never heard of John Mo…
Trauma Envy
Strangers in Analysis: Nationalism and the Talking Cure
Nonwestern Electric
Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing
Sounds: The Ambient Humanities
This book is a study of sounds that aims to write the resonance and response they call for. It seeks to critique existing models in the expanding field of sound studies and draw attention to sound as an object of study that solicits a humanistic approach encompassing many types of sounds, not just readily classified examples such as speech, music, industrial sounds, or codified signals. The text looks into the fact that beyond hearing and listeni…
Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking
Percussion is an attempt-in the author's words-to make sense of "senseless beating," to grasp how rhythm makes sense in music and society. Both a scholar and a former professional drummer, John Mowitt forges a striking encounter between cultural studies and new musicology that seeks to lay out the "percussive field" through which beating-specifically the backbeat that defines early rock-and-roll-comes to matter for raced, urban subjects.For Mowit…
Trauma Envy
Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy
The Color of Noise
Initially presented as a lecture in Hout Bay, South Africa, this article seeks to realize three aims. First, under the capacious heading of postcolonial sound studies, it attempts to think the articulation between racial difference and sound by probing the now common association of color and noise, for example, the “pink” noise routinely used as a sleep aid. Despite the existence of white and black noise, color is here attributed to signal charac…
Red Assembly: East London Calling
Paolo Veronese’s Wedding at Cana and Simon Gush’s Red. Two artworks, one from the North (Venice), one from the South (East London).Figure 1. Simon Gush, Red, 2014. Installation view, Ann Bryant Gal
Radio Silence; or, On the Fritz
This paper is a series of comparative observations—at once philological, technological, and psychoanalytical—on the phenomenon of what is referred to as radio silence. Using both terms to pressure each other, these observations feedback and build to a consideration of the relation between silence and death in which death refers less to a bio-physiological state than to a condition of unknowing or unthinking. Radio thus emerges as a high-pitched d…
Like a Whisper
This essay proposes that we grasp whispering as a problem, a sound source haunted by the violent exclusion of the animal from the medium of communication. Justification for this proposition is provided by examining the intertwining of whispering, allegory, and trauma, especially as these motifs have come to be agitated in various discourses of popular culture. Specifically, the author traces the manifestation of the figure of the Whisperer as it …
Exact and Human
Boston, January 17th, 1950, sky 38% cloudy, cirro cumulus. A depression was announced over the Atlantic; it was moving from West to East toward an anticyclone situated over Russia, and so far showed no signs of avoiding it by swerving to the north. The isotherms and isotheres fulfilled their obligations. Robert Musil publishes in 1931 the first volume of The Man Without Qualities. From the first chapter, remarkably enough, nothing follows. As a c…
Mouthpiece / Grapheces
Exact and Human
Boston, January 17th, 1950, sky 38% cloudy, cirro cumulus. A depression was announced over the Atlantic; it was moving from West to East toward an anticyclone situated over Russia, and so far showed no signs of avoiding it by swerving to the north. The isotherms and isotheres fulfilled their obligations. Robert Musil publishes in 1931 the first volume of The Man Without Qualities. From the first chapter, remarkably enough, nothing follows. As a c…
Death Sentence
Of Mice and Kids
I cannot remember when I first saw the logo-signature of the CBS Evening News; I have watched it uncritically countless times. In attempting to specify the socio-political and libidinal character of television in the United States at a relatively precise historical moment I find myself finally capable of taking a critical perspective on it. The following sequence appears at the opening and closing of every broadcast. First, a circle appears super…
Michel Foucault: Power, Truth, Strategy
Towards a Non-Euclidean Rhetoric: Lautreamont and Ponge
This paper is an exercise in political interpretation. Political not in the strict sense of an overt ideological parti pris (though this certainly occurs) but in the more restricted sense of contesting, in principle and in practice, the hegemonic critical conviction that interpretation is a cultural enterprise removed from the vicissitudes of daily life. What this means with regard to literary interpretation is this: there is nothing significant …
Humanism's Barbarous Face: Critical Theory and the Twilight of the Humanities
John Mowitt, Humanism's Barbarous Face: Critical Theory and the Twilight of the Humanities, boundary 2, Vol. 12/13, Vol. 12, no. 3 - Vol. 13, no. 1, On Humanism and the University I: The Discourse of Humanism (Spring - Autumn, 1984), pp. 121-141
Cinema As Slaughterbench of History: Nuit et Brouillard
Concepts in Film Theory
This book is designed for anyone with a serious interest in the art of film. It is both a history of film theory and an introduction to the work of the most important and influential writers on the subject - Munsterberg, Arnheim, Eisenstein, Balazs, Kracauer, Bazin, Mitry, and Metz. Andrew sets out these major theorists one against the other forcing them to speak to common issues, thereby making them reveal the bases of their thought. He compares…
The coming of the text: The text of publicity
(1989). The coming of the text: The text of publicity. History of European Ideas: Vol. 11, No. 1-6, pp. 573-582
What is called “critical thinking?”
Algerian Nation: Fanon's Fetish
espite the irreverent tone of my title I do not intend to indulge in a denunciation of Fanon's analysis of the Algerian revolution. That is a gesture perhaps best left to those participants who have lived to witness the bureaucratization of the Algerian state (especially in the period following Colonel Boumedienne's 1965 coup) and the explosion of ethnic, class, and religious antagonisms that continue to plague postcolonial Algeria even as we pas…
Sembene Ousmanes Xala: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages
Research Article| May 01 1993 Sembene Ousmanes Xala: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages John Mowitt John Mowitt Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Camera Obscura (1993) 11 (1 (31)): 71–95. https://doi.org/10.1215/02705346-11-1_31-71 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation John Mowitt; Sembene Ousmanes Xala: Postcoloniality and Foreign Film Languages. Camera Obscura 1 May 1993; 11 (1…
Foucault and Literature: Towards a Genealogy of Writing
Strangers in Analysis: Nationalism and the Talking Cure
Nonwestern Electric
Perhaps Even Violently, via the Jolts of Fashion: An Interview by Paul Bowman
What follows is an interview with Professor John Mowitt of the University of Minnesota, which was conducted by e-mail throughout the Summer of 1999. Existing readers of parallax will be familiar with his name. Perhaps, also, you have read his book, Text: The Genealogy of an Antidisciplinary Object.1 If so, you might already 'know' why he would/should be asked for his thoughts on the theme of this issue. But perhaps you have never heard of John Mo…
Trauma Envy
Percussion: Drumming, Beating, Striking
Percussion is an attempt-in the author's words-to make sense of "senseless beating," to grasp how rhythm makes sense in music and society. Both a scholar and a former professional drummer, John Mowitt forges a striking encounter between cultural studies and new musicology that seeks to lay out the "percussive field" through which beating-specifically the backbeat that defines early rock-and-roll-comes to matter for raced, urban subjects.For Mowit…
Miniature: Making Short Work
Tune Stuck in the Head
Spins
This essay explores some of the points of contact between philosophical reflection and dance. Paying close attention to way the figure of dance is put to work in texts by Norbert Elias, Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Paul de Man, Plato, and Jacques Derrida, the essay teases out a connection between the philosophical gesture of exemplification, the non sequitur whereby the abstract is propped up by or otherwise made to lean upo…
Saying Yes, to No
Like a Whisper
This essay proposes that we grasp whispering as a problem, a sound source haunted by the violent exclusion of the animal from the medium of communication. Justification for this proposition is provided by examining the intertwining of whispering, allegory, and trauma, especially as these motifs have come to be agitated in various discourses of popular culture. Specifically, the author traces the manifestation of the figure of the Whisperer as it …
Radio Silence; or, On the Fritz
This paper is a series of comparative observations—at once philological, technological, and psychoanalytical—on the phenomenon of what is referred to as radio silence. Using both terms to pressure each other, these observations feedback and build to a consideration of the relation between silence and death in which death refers less to a bio-physiological state than to a condition of unknowing or unthinking. Radio thus emerges as a high-pitched d…
Art (19 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Art history (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works)